Gunter Grass is today one of the world's most functioning conscience-keepers. And the Swedish Academy's selection of him as the new literary laureate only magnifies the worth of the disillusioned debunker in the global literary market. He is a self-chosen outsider in a monstrous fatherland where one man's mega-fantasy has become a million's marginalisation. Where the Wall has migrated to the mind. Grass, who once upon a time could shatter anystructure of separation by beating a tin drum, has not stopped whining since the day Germany opted to redeem the past. He wrote essays, he wrote passable novels, he called names, he did every imaginable words to mythicise the doom. Apparently, he saw it coming, he deciphered the murmurs of national mortality from the polyphony of Wall-falling celebrations: ``Tougher times are coming, they are arriving to the sound of pealing bells and from now on the way ahead to the abuse of all Germany lies open.''

When they arrived, in the rising wail of the Turkish mother, in the slogans of the neo-Nazi, in D-mark's demonic distribution of happiness, Grass stood there smugly vindicated, beating the drum to the rhythm of I-told-you-so. The social democrat, the friend of Willy Brandt, saw the isolation of his own liberal conscience. ``A monster wants to be a great power. I place my No on its doorstep''. Anguished by Helmut Kohl's history-seeking blunder, Grass, so far a constitutional patriot, elected himself the keeperof Germany's - rather Europe's - conscience. Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad) is his fictional statement of protest against the post-communist, post-Wall, markets of salvation. In contemporary Grassland, peace is not possible even in the cemetery of reconciliation, the quiet symphony of memory is not compatible with the soulless exuberance of the post-Marxian market, where unkenrufe, the call of doom, goes unheeded.

If the burden of the conscience-keeper looks like a bondage, the problem is entirely with Grass, the way this burden weighs down his words. Forty years ago, the closing words of Oskar Matzerath were: ``Always somewhere behind me, the Black Witch./Now ahead of me, too, facing me, Black./Black words, black coat, black money./But if children sing, they sing no longer:/ Where's the Witch, black as pitch?/Here's the black, wicked Witch./ Ha! ha! ha!''

When the three-year old Oskar of arrested growth sang, the song was resonant with the black grotesqueries of history. The drumbeats offiction's most celebrated, and redeemingly wicked, dwarf not only shattered the pretence of the Nazi era but rewrote the art of storytelling. The author of The Tin Drum was a pioneering fabulist in the imagination of modern Europe. The best of Grass, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, has made Danzig, today's Gdansk, every man's memory zone, where the passions of the past and the enchantment of existence achieve perfect harmony -- so fabulously perfect.

Grass has lost the fabulous long ago. The vintage Grass, like the best of European novelists, is trapped in history. The Grass we read today is raging against history. His drumbeats are no longer fabulous. They echo the disillusion of a pessimist. It doesn't mean that conscience-keeping is a bad vocation for good novelists. Writers like Vargas Llosa, Saramago and Amos Oz continue to write nationally-conscious, fabulously inventive novels. Grass's disillusioned liberalism won't let Germany to be a `normal'country. Unfortunately, hisdisillusion has discarded the tin drum and opted for the trumpet of trite doomsday prophecies.

``Only those who know and respect stasis in progress, who have once and more than once given up, who have sat on an empty snail shell and experienced the dark side of utopia, can evaluate progress'', Grass wrote in his almost autobiographical novel From the Diary of a Snail. Grass, whose Nobel Prize happily coincides with the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, refuses to evaluate the progress of a continent where the Wall is as distant as the word of the wailing novelist.